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In October 2012, Microsoft launched four Bing apps on Windows 8; News, Weather, Finance, and Sports. Less than one year later, in August 2013, those apps made their way to Windows Phone with a mobile-optimized design.

One of the most popular of the bunch, at least from the Windows Phone app store reviews is Bing News. The app tackles the top headlines of each day, and lets you personalize your news experience by choosing specific topics of interest and news sources to follow. From my testing, it lives up to its hype.

Getting the news
Bing News gets its news stories from two kinds of sources: publications that partnered with the Bing team to bring content into the app and publications that didn't. ABC News, Fox News, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, and Bloomberg are a few of those content partners. When you open an article from one of these sources, it loads in the app's reader, where you can adjust the font size and style.

The sources that partnered with the app also get specially designed pages in the app that highlight their latest articles, videos, and photo galleries. I really enjoyed those special pages, because they are well-organized and easy to browse.

Bing News also includes news from more than 100 popular news outlets spanning global and local news, technology, entertainment, and sports, that didn't team up with Bing to deliver their content. When you open an article from these sources, it will load in your phone's browser, forcing you to leave the app. This was irritating.

Design
When you open the app, you're greeted by a full-screen photo that matches the top news story of the moment and that story's headline. That article changes every few hours or when there's breaking news.

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Bing News' main page (left) and a list of top headlines.
Screenshot by Sarah Mitroff/CNET

If you pin Bing News to your start screen, the live tile will show the same top news story with the photo and flip to reveal the headline.

Just to the right of the top story screen is a list of latest headlines, separated by popular news categories, including business, sports, technology, and world news. Each category only has four stories, so you don't get overwhelmed by too much news. At the bottom of the screen, there are buttons to reorder the categories and delete ones you don't want to see.

Sarah Mitroff is a CNET associate editor who reviews Android software and mobile hardware. In the past, she's also written about consumer tech, startups, and business news for Wired, MacWorld, PCWorld, and VentureBeat.
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